yond me! I do not understand her, and
don't try to. Not like other women at all, takes no pleasure in things
seemingly; curious, with her good looks--very curious. But nobody
understands Beatrice."

Geoffrey breathed a sigh of relief. "And how are tithes being paid, Mr.
Granger? not very grandly, I fear. I saw that scoundrel Jones died in
prison."

Mr. Granger woke up at once. Before he had been talking almost at
random; the subject of his daughters did not greatly interest him. What
did interest him was this money question. Nor was it very wonderful;
the poor narrow-minded old man had thought about money till he could
scarcely find room for anything else, indeed nothing else really touched
him closely. He broke into a long story of his wrongs, and, drawing
a paper from his breast pocket, with shaking finger pointed out to
Geoffrey how that his clerical income for the last six months had been
at the rate of only forty pounds a year, upon which sum even a Welsh
clergyman could not consider himself passing rich. Geoffrey listened and
sympathised; then came a pause.

"That's how we've been getting on at Bryngelly, Mr. Bingham," Mr.
Granger said presently, "starving, pretty well starving. It's only you
who have been making money; we've been sitting on the same dock-leaf
while you have become a great man. If it had not been for Beatrice's
salary--she's behaved very well about the salary, has Beatrice--I am
sure I don't understand how the poor girl clothes herself on what she
keeps; I know that she had to go without a warm cloak this winter,
because she got a cough from it--we should have been in the workhouse,
and that's where we shall be yet," and he rubbed the back of his
withered hand across his eyes.

Geoffrey gasped. Beatrice with scarcely enough means to clothe
herself--Beatrice shivering and becoming ill from the want of a cloak
while _he_ lived in luxury! It made him sick to think of it. For a
moment he could say nothing.

"I have come here--I've come," went on the old man in a broken voice,
broken not so much by shame at having to make the request as from fear
lest it should be refused, "to ask you if you could lend me a little
money. I don't know where to turn, I don't indeed, or I would not do it,
Mr. Bingham. I have spent my last pound to get here. If you could lend
me a hundred pounds I'd give you note of hand for it and try to pay
it back little by little; we might take twenty pounds a year from
Beatrice